RETREAT FOR TORIES
Alberta PCS let their hubris show with $70,000 Jasper trip
“It’s their off-season,” says deputy premier Doug Horner, another happy short-term resident of the magnificent Fairmont Jasper Park Lodge.
Maybe the prices are down a bit, but the grand old resort is doing just fine. For two days it’s been bustling with Tory MLAS and candidates on full Jasper junket.
The taxpayer will cover $70,000 for the MLAS; unelected candidates’ tabs are paid by the PC party.
But why are those groups even mixing, if not for election readiness?
The hubris of spending that kind of dough even for a routine caucus retreat, with a deficit budget and an election looming, is breathtaking even for our durable Tory regime.
The $70,000 comes from caucus funding, which technically means it’s legislature money rather than government cash. But every last buck still derives from the public trough.
The PCS do not appear to care. With the rise of Premier Alison Redford, the party has a growing belief that Alberta is once again a pre-stelmach heaven where the opposition is just an annoyance, not a threat.
To accept that notion, they have to ignore conflicting polls and public irritation with this retreat, as well as last week’s cabinet tour.
All opposition parties are fulminating about the retreat.
“It’s hard to find words,” said Wildrose MLA Rob Anderson. “They talk about zero-based budgeting and the same day we find out about a $70,000 junket. Can people honestly look at them and say they have any credibility? I wouldn’t trust them with a lemonade stand.”
Anderson was just coming out of a hearing at the Mcdougall Centre, where former justice Jack Major heard submissions about reforms to MLAS’ pay and lush severance deals.
And that project, you’ll recall, emerged in a straight line from the mammoth raises the PC majority awarded MLAS and ministers only three months after the 2008 election.
Redford enabled the panel, but it’s already getting hard to distinguish the new mentality from the old.
Only last week, the PCS spent $100,000 in public funds for the cabinet tour. This was widely criticized as electioneering at public expense.
Former minister Lloyd Snelgrove blasted the tour, and then quit the caucus.
And all this is happening just as Tories are trumpeting their “results-based budgeting” bill, which calls for scrutiny of all expenses, no matter how small, to see if they’re needed.
The group that hopes to write those budgets thinks it’s fine to spend $70,000 in Jasper. Lord help us. And they’re hardly short of good places to meet.
In Calgary, the government has the Mcdougall Centre. Better still is Edmonton’s Government House, where caucus meets regularly in elegant, old rooms.
The skiing’s not so good, unless you care to plunge off a cliff into the river valley, but for meetings Government House is perfect — and free.
I asked Stephen Carter, Redford’s chief of staff, why Jasper Park Lodge is any better for this venture than Government House.
“Well, a retreat focuses people,” Carter said in a text message. “They are all in one place. People start early and work late.”
He notes that “corporations, non-profits and others use retreats. It is not like we invented the concept.”
True. But they sure know how to use it.